Hi, this is Bob from Plugable Technologies. In a previous
video, I went over managing Thunderbolt three devices with
the Intel Thunderbolt three software on a windows system. In
this video, I'd like to do the same thing, but speak to a
potential difference you may see when trying to do the same tasks
on your own system. That sounds a little bit confusing. What do
I mean by that? Well, when Thunderbolt three devices were
first released, or rather I should say Thunderball three
systems, Intel released a driver and a management utility to
manage their operation on windows. That's the Intel
Thunderbolt software. So quick refresher. That software is
located down here in the task tray. If I right click on it, I
can do things like you attached devices like
Plugable Thunderbolt three docking station. I can approve
devices, change settings and see more information about the
software that's installed right here. We can see that the
Thunderbolt software is this version. Well, if I go and look
on my system manufacturer site for Intel driver versions, I'm
going to see some interesting stuff. So let's take a look or
bring over my application window. This is the download
page from Intel for the drivers. For my system, it's an Intel
nook desktop with hon three. If I scroll down in the list of
available drivers, I can see a Thunderbolt three legacy driver
for windows 10 and then a little later I can see a
Thunderbolt three DCH driver for windows 10 now without getting
too in depth, there's two versions of legacy version and
the newer DCH version. Now while the drivers in essence do the
same thing, the end user facing utility that used to manage the
Thunderbolt devices will look a little different. So what I'm
going to do now is I'm going to pause the video momentarily,
stop on, install the legacy driver and software utility for
Thunderbolt devices on my system and install the updated
Thunderbolt three DCH driver and utility so that we can compare
and contrast how things work. All right. I've now removed the
legacy version of the Thunderbolt driver for my system
and installed the updated DCH version of the Thunderbolt
driver from Intel. Now when I did that, something that
happened automatically is that the new Thunderbolt driver
version prompted the automatic installation of a new utility to
manage Thunderbolt devices. Previously the application that
you interacted with was the Thunderbolt software. Well
automatically as a result of the new driver being installed, the
system installed the Thunderbolt control center from the
Microsoft store. Now this is a screenshot of the notification
because that notification only stays up temporarily before it
disappears and after the Thunderbolt control center was
installed, it gave me the option to launch it. So let's go ahead
and take a look that's actually not in the task tray. So let me
search for it. The Thunderbolt control center, get rid
of the screenshot and you can see it looks similar to what
we've saw before with the thunderbolts software. The
similarity in the names can be confusion, but it looks somewhat
different by default. It's showing the attached Thunderbolt
devices and it shows again, my pluggable Thunderbolt three
docking station. A little bit information about it, but the
way that you change what action you wish to do is now determined
by clicking on this button with the three lines they called the
open navigation menu. Some other people call it the hamburger
menu because the different items look like different elements of
a hamburger. So if I click it, I've got the option to approve
devices similar to what we've seen before where I can
determine what happens when these devices are connected. I
can see the attached devices, which is what we saw by the
default. When the application started. I can manage all the
approved devices on the system from my Thunderbolt three
docking station to another Thunderbolt three device I'd
connected previously but isn't connected now our Thunderbolt
three they'll display it after and then finally see more
information about the Thunderbolt software itself. And
this instance we can see the application version number has
changed, the controller driver version has changed and we get
similar information about the Thunderbolt controller itself in
terms of its NBN firmware version and the Thunderbolt
security level. So as a quick overview of everything that
we've seen initially, Intel
released Thunderbolt software and a legacy driver version to
manage Thunderbolt three devices on windows 10 newer systems may
come with an updated DCH version of the that functions similarly,
but its appearance in terms of its end user management has
changed from the Intel Thunderbolt software to using
the Intel Thunderbolt control center application available
from the Microsoft store. So hopefully you find that
information useful. And thank you for watching.